executives instead favor patronage -political discretion- in public employment. This paper proposes and tests an original theory … to explain when executives forsake patronage for merit. The theory exploits exogenous variation in the institutional … comparison of reforms in Paraguay, the Dominican Republic and the United States validates the theory. How patronage states are …

the incidence of corruption. We first present an interaction-based model on corruption that predicts that the level of … corruption is positively associated with social interaction. Then we empirically verify the theoretical prediction using within … a statistically significantly positive effect on the corruption rate in China. Our findings, therefore, underscore the …

The ambiguous phenomenon of corruption has long been the cause of great theoretical debate in economics. By using … Structural Equation Modelling, with the two types of corruption as a latent variable, this paper employs causal and indicative … variables specific to the Latin American region to test for rent seeking and systemic corruption in the period between 1980 …

these policies commonly relies on information provided by a bureaucracy. Environmental bureaucrats often have a political …

systematically larger along the pre-Islamic trade routes in the Old World. The theory argues that this particular type of geography …